The Discipline of Organizing: Professional Edition, 4th Edition

2.6. How (or by Whom) Is It Organized?

“The rise of the Internet is affecting the actual work of organizing information by shifting it from a relatively few professional indexers and catalogers to the populace at large. An important question today is whether the bibliographic universe can be organized both intelligently (that is, to meet the traditional bibliographic objectives) and automatically.”

—(Svenonius 2000, p. 26)

In the preceding quote, Svenonius identifies three different ways for the “work of organizing information” to be performed: by professional indexers and catalogers, by the populace at large, and by automated (computerized) processes. Our notion of the organizing system is broader than her “bibliographic universe,” making it necessary to extend her taxonomy. Authors are increasingly organizing the content they create, and it is important to distinguish users in informal and formal or institutional contexts. We have also introduced the concept of an organizing agent (§1.6) to unify organizing done by people and by computer algorithms.

Professional indexers and catalogers undergo extensive training to learn the concepts, controlled descriptive vocabularies, and standard classifications in the particular domains in which they work. Their goal is not only to describe individual resources, but to position them in the larger collection in which they reside.41[LIS] They can create and maintain organizing systems with consistent high quality, but their work often requires ...